Part One: How The U.S. Government Used Aliens To Destroy a Man's Mind

This week we tell the harrowing story of Paul Bennewitz, a simple nerdy engineer who spotted evidence of covert Air Force weapons programs and was gaslit into believing they were alien spacecraft.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Also media Jiminy Christmas, Welcome back to Behind the Bastards,
a podcast that's, for whatever reason, is about aliens. Right now, Look, folks,
after three straight weeks of OPRAH, I needed something fun.
Uh So we did a couple of book episodes on
aliens and then I fell down a rabbit hole, and

(00:23):
so this week we're bringing back one of our favorite guests,
the Great Brandy Posey. Brandy, Welcome to the show. Do
you believe in aliens?

Speaker 2 (00:35):
Well that's a good question, because like what is an alien?
I guess is how do you want to define it?
And also do you believe in multiple dimensions? Because these are.

Speaker 1 (00:45):
You know what? That's all right, I hoped for, Not
so much the dimension stuff we're gonna be talking about.
We're gonna be talking about a real active bastardry that's
kind of at the very beginning, not well not the beginning,
kind of the middle point. But it's it's foundational to
the UFO culture that gave us the X Files. Like
we are talking about the stuff that became the X Files,

(01:06):
which started as a disinformation campaign, and a lot of
it can be tied specifically to an Air Force intelligence
guy named Richard Dodie, who was basically brought in to
mentally abuse and destroy a basically decent, possibly definitely too
credulous guy who started finding evidence of, like recording evidence

(01:32):
of like secret Air Force research, and so the Air
Force was like, let's convince this guy it's all aliens,
and they kind of destroyed his mind. So that's the
story we're telling me about this.

Speaker 3 (01:43):
It's a excellent.

Speaker 1 (01:45):
Yeah, it's a fascinating tale, both because it explains a
lot of how we get to qan on, how we
do get stuff like the X Files, a lot of
kind of the core myths of UFO, conspiracy culture, all
that stuff. But it's also just a great story about
like US Intelligence services absolutely destroying a man in order

(02:05):
to protect their ability to make engines of death, which
is you know, that's that's some good stuff. We all
love this shit.

Speaker 2 (02:13):
Yeah, the more examples the better, and there are many,
but I don't know any with aliens yet, So very exciting.

Speaker 1 (02:19):
Yeah, this will be a lot with aliens. And I'm
you know, I'm I think where I come down on this.
I don't believe I've never seen anything that's made me
convinced that there's life outside of this planet, but I'm
like open minded to it, like Foxholder, I'd like to
believe I'm just open minded in the sense that I'm

(02:39):
a skeptic, Like I don't think. I get kind of
pissed when people look at folks who are kind of
genuinely trying to interrogate the information out there and are like, well,
that's just crazy to think about, because it's not and
it's not crazy to think that the government would lie
about stuff like that. But that said, everything I've ever seen,
including like the stuff that came out at twenty twenty,
twenty twenty one, that pill shaped craft, you know, that's

(03:03):
kind of like the most recent big UFO disclosure. And
if you watch that audio, because it's all from like
I think F eighteen pilots, you can hear the pilots
are genuinely like, what the fuck is this thing? I
have no idea what it is, right, and I do
I understand why people default too, well, that must mean
it's aliens. But like, there's a long history of all
sorts of countries the United States and countries that are

(03:26):
geopolitical enemies of the United States testing all sorts of
weird craft that like people don't like are capable of
doing things people did not know was possible at the time.
And that is like the origin of most of our
UFO myths is stuff that's completely explicable that you wouldn't
let some pilot in on, right, because it's too sure
for him.

Speaker 3 (03:46):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (03:46):
Well, because like you can imagine, like also, the first
time somebody saw an automobile, did they think that was
an alien? It's just you know, human, where as we're
building technology in different ways, yeah.

Speaker 1 (03:57):
Or as we'll talk about because this is a lot
of the story we're talking about the day the first
time people saw drones, right, especially at night. You know,
you've got this this thing that's got a bunch of
lights on it that moves in a way that planes
certainly don't move like drones. Right, you see that shit
in nineteen eighty in the dead of night above an
air Force base. It's not necessarily like you're not a

(04:20):
crazy person to being like, well, I wonder if that's
something like fucking not of this earth? Right, And the
Air Force, Like, the basic story we're telling today is
the Air Force being like, oh yeah, that's much better
than them believing we're working on ways to murder people
through robots. Yeah, yeah, yeah, So that's the story we're
gonna tell this week, and that's the end of the

(04:42):
cold open ah, and we're back. We're starting the episodes. Brandy,
it's been a bit since you've been on the show.
You are a very busy person, and I wanted to
before we get into the episode. Is there anything you
wanted to kind of plug up top?

Speaker 2 (05:00):
Yeah? Definitely. So my podcast, Lady to Lady has been
around for thirteen years at this point. We were every
Wednesday for thirteen years. We're an independent show where me
and my two co hosts have a fourth guest one
every week who's usually another female identifying person, and it's
just for women riffing in like a positive way, which

(05:21):
is something that entertainment doesn't want to show you very often.
So they've been around forever. I also have an independent
comedy record label that I started last year called burn
This Record, so you can find us on Instagram at
a burn This Records dot com. And basically that is
like a completely day project trying to lift off voices
from around the country that other labels aren't dealing with,

(05:44):
and I'm also doing it in a much less predatory
way than most comedy labels work. I've always self released
all of my own things, and I'm just like expanding
that information to try to like include more people and
kind of keep.

Speaker 1 (05:58):
Yeah as a rule in the end history, the only
thing more evil than like the NSSAY and military intelligence
is comedy labels.

Speaker 2 (06:06):
Yes, very, I mean honestly, you're not wrong.

Speaker 3 (06:09):
Oh no, that was only a partial joke.

Speaker 2 (06:11):
We could do. Yeah, I have a couple of bastards
for you for later, if you ever want to need
a couple of pitches.

Speaker 1 (06:18):
It is funny how like horror, horror cinema and whatnot.
Nearly all like nice people involved in making it comedy
real mixed bag, A lot of monsters in comedy.

Speaker 2 (06:28):
Nice people you, Oh yeah, I mean the best, the
best of people and the worst of people I've met
in comedy. And I think comedy is an important thing
in our culture because I think it's important to remember
that just because someone makes you laugh and is charming,
it does not mean they were a good person at all.
It is a trick. It's a trick that we're able
to do. Actually, one of the most important things to

(06:49):
accept about the world is like, just because somebody's you know,
we we don't need to get into this right now,
but I agree with you entirely.

Speaker 1 (06:59):
So yeah, yeah to fucking aliens. Now alliens, fucking aliens,
but back to fucking aliens.

Speaker 2 (07:05):
I don't know where this story is going. We'll see
maybe maybe.

Speaker 1 (07:08):
I mean it actually always nearly always doesn't like lead
any if you follow like any UFO conspiracy threat, it
does eventually like lead to people are breeding with the aliens.

Speaker 3 (07:19):
I mean that was a big part.

Speaker 1 (07:20):
Of the first five seasons of The X Files, right,
But yeah, the I started this episode by talking about
that Air Force footage. It's actually, honestly, I forget if
they were a force or Navy pilots, but it was
released twenty twenty, twenty twenty one of that like pill shaped,
weird thing in the sky that you know, those pilots are, like,
what the fuck is this shit? As I wrote this

(07:40):
the near the end of January twenty twenty five, the
most recent kind of big UFO news was that a
few days before we recorded this episode, Republican representative Tim
Burchett claimed that he spoke to an admiral who he
did not name, who told him that he had seen
that there was evidence that the Navy had evidence of
an unidea fed naval vehicle quote moving at hundreds of

(08:03):
miles an hour underwater that was as large as a
football field, Which sounds like he's trying to prepare us
for the idea that SeaQuest is real. And I hope
that means that Roy Scheider has secretly been alive this.

Speaker 2 (08:15):
Whole time because Jonathan brandis Let's.

Speaker 1 (08:17):
Say, Jonathan brandis, yes, yes, get them all back, bring
them all back. I'm so glad you got my SeaQuest joke, Brandy, No,
what ever does Prior to this, in November of twenty
twenty four, the Pentagon had published a report revealing hundreds
of previously undocumented UFO sidings. Now again UFO, and they

(08:39):
use unidentified aerial phenomena I think is the actual official
term they use. But like, this does not mean there
are hundreds of cases of the Pentagon said, yeah, we've
seen hundreds of alien signings. It means we've seen hundreds
of things in the sky at various points that like
we don't actually know fully what they are, right because
a lot of people being flying a lot of weird
shit in the sky, right, we just had a mile

(09:00):
public hysteria When unidentified drones were spotted flying over cities
in the Northeast. People panicked. There was like reports that, oh,
it's Iran has a drone carrier parked off the coast,
And like, guys, if you've been like looking at how
fucking Iranian power projection has been working in the areas
right next to them, they're not flying drones over DC

(09:21):
from a fucking hidden carrier. Panic was stoked by initial
claims by government officials that there was no record the FBI.
Someone came out was like, we don't have any record
of schedule drone flights, and people I know freaked out
because you're like, well, the FBI says they don't know
what it is. And again I need you, as I
always ask, think back to nine to eleven, right, where

(09:42):
all of these different federal agencies had pieces of that
and none of them talked to each other. The fact
that the FBI didn't know about this shit is not weird.
Eight government agencies are dogshit at talking to each other.
And in fact, it took several weeks, but in late January,
after the transition, the White House made a statement that
the drone flights had in fact been approved. This was

(10:02):
just everyone kind of fucking up, and the confusion was
likely stoked by a confluence of factors. Drone development is
advancing rapidly. Different federal agencies are bad at talking to
each other. Some of the drones being tested were likely
so classified that individuals involved preferred a public panic over
UFOs or Iranian drone carriers to actual info about their
projects being revealed. And all of these reasons are essentially

(10:24):
the same reasons that led to the birth of UFO
conspiracy theories in the first place, Starting with the supposed
crash landing at Roswell, New Mexico in nineteen forty seven.
The OG, Yeah, the OG, and it's I think there's
this attitude that, like, we have Roswell. There's this crash
in forty seven. The government initially says, and this is

(10:45):
what's really unique about Roswell. The first government reports are
some sort of fucking saucer crashed, right, yeah, the only
time that's really happened. And then they came out and said,
now it's a weather balloon. But there's this attitude that like,
and from that moment, Roswell was like the center UFO culture.
It really wasn't. It actually kind of fell off for
like more than a decade before people started like kind

(11:08):
of recentering Roswell in American UFO mythos. And part of
why so, first, when we're talking about like what actually
happened at Roswell, probably the best non alien theory is
that earlier in nineteen forty and I think this is
pretty credible. Earlier in nineteen forty seven, the US government
had launched something called Project Mogul, and the idea was

(11:29):
to set up a series of balloon listening stations to
receive and record evidence of Soviet nuclear trials. Researchers from
the US Army Air Force's Secret Are and D Division
tested a cluster of fourteen of these balloons, one of
which went down near Roswell in July. Just a few
weeks earlier, in June, a Republican politician and pilot named
Kenneth Arnold had sparked the first great UFO panic in

(11:52):
US history by reporting to have seen nine silver discs
flying near Mount Rainier, Washington. When the rancher who owned
the land and oswell that one of these balloons crashed
onto a guy named Mac Brazil went to the nearby
airfield and like went to the Air Force. Well, the
Army Air Corps was like, hey, I found like some
weird shit on my property. They sent out investigators. Now,

(12:14):
due to the secrecy behind Project Mogul, the investigators they
sent didn't know about that project. So some of these guys,
and in fact, the guy who's kind of first unseen
will claim years later and will be consistent for the
rest of his life after that point and believing in
saying like I saw an like an craft, I can't explain.

(12:34):
I believe it was an alien craft, right, or the
remains of an alien craft. Now, again, there was technology
in these air balloons that was not widely available or
that people and that people were not widely knowledgeable about.
And the guys who responded to this crash didn't fucking
know about the program because it was heavily classified. So
you know, you can come out of this either saying like, well,

(12:56):
I think that they did find some aliens, or I
think probably if we're doing the Akham's razor thing, it's
not super weird to assume like, yeah, the government, every
every part of our incredibly paranoid defense industry was lying
to every other part and hiding all sorts of shit,
and these guys just didn't know what the fuck they saw.

Speaker 2 (13:16):
Well, I think often like we want aliens to be
true instead of that like it feels Yeah, it's much
more comforting. I mean yeah, I think people are even
with everything, all the little videos and everything been coming
out in the last few years and keep people keep
being like yeah, sure, okay, great, would love it. Can
they can they take over?

Speaker 3 (13:34):
Yeah?

Speaker 2 (13:34):
Sure an alien is here. That means somebody is actually
maybe in charge. That isn't us. It'd be great.

Speaker 3 (13:40):
It's the I used to.

Speaker 1 (13:41):
I definitely had that period where I was more in
the like dark hunter in the forest sort of thing,
like oh, maybe we don't want aliens, you know, to no, no, no,
at this point, if there's aliens, fuck, they can't be
worse than us.

Speaker 3 (13:53):
They literally can't.

Speaker 1 (13:54):
Like we're so bad at running our country at our planet, like.

Speaker 3 (13:59):
Just them on, let them in.

Speaker 2 (14:01):
Yeah exactly.

Speaker 3 (14:03):
They want to eat us.

Speaker 1 (14:04):
Fine, I'm all we're already all being eaten. We're already
being consumed by the guys who owned fucking banks and
social media companies. We might as well be eaten by
aliens who have cool shit.

Speaker 2 (14:14):
Yeah, maybe plastic has been an alien the entire time.
It why not take over Ever's brain?

Speaker 1 (14:21):
Oh God, I would I would feel such a sense
of peace if the mushroom men at the center of
Mount Shasta were proved to be real. Truly, but alas so,
initial local reporting on the Roswell crash was pretty good.
It described accurately what was found on Max Farm. To
further alay suspicions, the Army allowed several journalists to tour

(14:41):
the nearby base at Alamagordo, where they were fed a
series of lies about the weather balloon. Namely, they were
told it was for meteorological purposes, not for spying on
Russian nuclear tests, because we really didn't want people to
know how well the Russians were doing at some of
that stuff, right, But otherwise they were generally accurately informed
about the crash and that it for a while. Interest

(15:01):
in UFOs flat lined not long after Roswell thanks to
Kenneth Arnold, now the whole Pacific Northwest had caught UFO
fever after he made public statements about seeing that group
of UFOs around Rainier and on July first, people in
and around Twin Falls, Idaho started seeing glowing discs or
balls in the sky. So many people saw them in

(15:22):
such quick succession that something real had to be going on.
This is one of those things where it's like, wow,
a shitload of people are seeing something like this is
not just a hysteria. And it was not just a hysteria.
One of the discs was recovered and was found to
be a thirty inch metal disc with a plexiglass bubble
and some scratch assembled electronic parts, vacuum tubes and shit.

(15:44):
The whole thing turned out to have been a prank
by some kids with a basic understanding of engineering.

Speaker 3 (15:48):
They built a fake UFO. Respect respect. It's cool.

Speaker 1 (15:51):
That's pretty cool. Yeah, yeah, I'm always supportive of doing that.
Why not fuck with people at this point?

Speaker 4 (15:57):
Ye?

Speaker 3 (15:57):
Absolutely, that's actually.

Speaker 1 (15:59):
What got us here. And maybe that's not a good idea.
Don't listen to me, folks, don't listen to me. We
maybe do if it's funny. So public interest in UFOs
kind of fell off after this. This is sort of
what makes people like because there's this initial surge in
interest and belief, and like roswell might have immediately been
kind of a big thing, but then there's this very
famous hoax that happens within days of roswell, and suddenly

(16:22):
people are like, oh, you know what, maybe only crazy
people in cranks believe in UFOs, right, And that's kind
of what happens after this, right, there's UFO culture continues
to evolve, but it's not a thing that the average
American feels good. If they take it seriously, you don't
want to talk about it, right, because then you'll get
kind of like written off as a kook, you know.

Speaker 2 (16:43):
Well, and it ruins of their lives. I think everyone
that's ever come forward like publicly about you know, a
potential alien encounter, they're not better for it after they've
told everybody about that.

Speaker 1 (16:54):
No, and as again as we'll talk about a lot
of those people, you know, are, we're definitely being fed
liesed by the government because government was like, well, shit,
we can distract attention from like the shit that we're
doing if we just like fuck with these people. So
in nineteen fifty, aguy named Frank Scully publishes a book
titled Behind the Flying Saucers, based on an article he'd
written for a variety. The core of this book, in

(17:16):
the core of that article was based on a speech
by an oil millionaire and alien obsessive named Silas Newton,
or at least that's how Silas Newton wanted people to
see him as like a guy who'd gotten rich in
oil and was also into aliens. Silas Newton was a
con man.

Speaker 2 (17:36):
As most silas As are. Not to smirch the Silases
of the world. Silai, I don't know.

Speaker 3 (17:41):
I've never met again Silas.

Speaker 2 (17:43):
Look another a name frankly thankfully lost to the ages
as well.

Speaker 3 (17:47):
That's right, that's right.

Speaker 1 (17:48):
Don't name your kids Silas. And if you're a Silas,
change your name right. Yeah, you know that's the official
stance of this podcast. Sorry, Silas is no.

Speaker 2 (17:55):
I agree, official stance of lady to lady as well.
I speak for my podcast podcasts are against Silas.

Speaker 1 (18:02):
We're going to get like ale, a whole group together
here that we're gonna be like the NATO of trying
to stop people from being named Silas.

Speaker 2 (18:12):
Yeah, absolutely.

Speaker 4 (18:14):
So.

Speaker 1 (18:15):
Author Adam go rightly describes what Newton is saying about
aliens in this lecture this way. Newton claimed that a
flying saucer piloted by other worldly midgets had crashed crashed
in Aztec. New Mexico in nineteen forty eight. The source
of Newton's saucer revelations was a mysterious doctor g who
had purportedly examined the remains of these interplanetary travelers and
viewed pieces of the saucer debris.

Speaker 3 (18:37):
So, you know, not the.

Speaker 1 (18:38):
Most woke way to describe any of this, but yeah,
in the fifties, what.

Speaker 3 (18:43):
Do you expect.

Speaker 2 (18:45):
That's interesting too, because like there's those Peruvian quote unquote
alien mummies that came out a year or two ago that.

Speaker 1 (18:52):
I'll just talk about those for a minute too, yeahah, yeah, yeah, yeah,
And that's that's a I don't know that we seem
to be generally believe that aliens are short rather than tall.

Speaker 3 (19:04):
Yeah, unless you which is got the Nordics of course.

Speaker 2 (19:08):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (19:09):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (19:12):
So Scully writes this book based on the kind of
shit that Silas is saying, and as soon as the
book comes out, it is revealed to all be based
on a host. Newton had been working with a friend
who spread lies about aliens because he was just sort
of a general con man. He was probably not a millionaire,
and he certainly did not have a legitimate oil business.
He actually made his money by selling fake leases to

(19:33):
supposedly oil rich land alongside magnetic oil detecting machine. So
he will he will sell you a lease that isn't
real to land and bring along a machine that you
can lease that will show you that there's oil on
that land, and none of it's real. Just a con man,
a beautiful con man, one of these. Well America is great.

Speaker 2 (19:50):
But that's pretty good.

Speaker 3 (19:51):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (19:52):
Yeah, So he's a scoundrel with an eye for any
con that might bring profit, and he was caught quickly.
But his work caught the eye of a group of
the greatest scoundrels and common in US history, the Central
Intelligence Agency or some government agency. We actually don't know
that it was the CIA. I don't know that any

(20:13):
of this is true as we're going to get to
all of the sources on stuff, like there's definitely definitely
a lot that is verifiable here. But every source who
comes forward from inside the government, all of the former
intel officers who talk about this stuff, they're all also
kind of not kind of they're all also extremely fucking shady,

(20:35):
and they lie about a ton of shit. So in
his book Saucer, Spooks and Kooks, Adam go Wrightley notes
that a former CIA officer, Carl Flock, claimed to have
uncovered records that Silas Newton was visited by shadowy government
agents who asked him to keep telling tall tales about
flying saucers. Flock mused, did the US government or someone
associated with it use Newton to discredit the idea of

(20:57):
crashed flying saucers so a real capture saucer or saucers
could be more easily kept under wraps. Was this actually
nothing to do with real saucers, but instead some sort
of psychological warfare operation? And I believe I think there's
a very good chance that Silas was encouraged to keep
doing this, because we have good documentation that different intel agencies,

(21:18):
including the NSA, encouraged people to tell.

Speaker 3 (21:22):
Flying saucer stories.

Speaker 1 (21:23):
Right, the CIA as well did this. I don't think
Silas Newton was being Again, I don't think this is
like psych warfare or necessarily covering up a real alien thing.
The evidence suggests that they're covering up weapons development, right. Yeah, So,
like a startling number of foundational UFO culture dudes, Carl

(21:44):
was also into right wing politics. After working at IBM
and the CIA, he was hired by the American Enterprise
Institute to work as a senior editor. He contributed to
The Libertarian Review and Reason magazine, as well as writing
short stories about aliens. During the Reagan administration, he was
made Deputy assists Secretary of Defense for Operational Test and Evaluation.
And this is a lot of a lot of these guys,

(22:07):
like so many. It's again, when people are kind of
casually into it, they'll be like, well, now it's pilots
saying that there's aliens, and now it's a member of
the government. And it's like from the beginning, the two
people making the most reports that there were aliens were
Republican politicians and pilots, because pilots see a lot of
weird shit, and Republicans believe anything you tell them.

Speaker 2 (22:27):
You know, Yeah, I know, exactly.

Speaker 3 (22:29):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (22:30):
So Flock is an interesting figure in UFO culture because
he was both a believer, or at least a quasi believer,
and a skeptic, publishing a book that ultimately debunked Roswell
and first made public the connection between that event and
Project Mogul. As guys in this world go, he's more
credible than most, but that comes with a big asterisk, right, Yeah, yeah,

(22:51):
So for a while, flying saucers are decidedly fringe, although
some of the most consistent true believers are former military
officers who often had intelligence clearances. In the nineteen fifties,
some of the most active UFO research groups by civilians
were made by and for former military intelligence guys. And
this may have had something to do with the fact
that the CIA and THEDIA the Defense Intelligence Agency, had

(23:14):
experimented by this early point in putting out misinformation on
UFOs to test subordinates, right, And the logic here is that, Okay,
you want to know this guy is kind of like
he's a security guard at a facility where we're really
doing some shit, and maybe he's someone we're thinking about
promoting to be in a more sensitive thing. Tell him
that there's aliens. Tell him that we have a flying saucer.

(23:36):
If that gets out in the media, you know, this
guy can't be trusted, right, And if he doesn't say shit,
then maybe you tell him the truth. Maybe you don't,
but like, either way, you know you can trust him
because if he's not going to tell the media that
like there's fucking aliens, maybe he's actually like somebody that
we can trust. With with real secrets.

Speaker 2 (23:52):
You know, I love that the government runs like scientology.

Speaker 3 (23:55):
It's absolutely runs like science, all cults all the way down.
Maybe that's American culture.

Speaker 2 (24:00):
Yeah, is that of xenu. It's whatever we're calling this one.

Speaker 3 (24:04):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (24:05):
Flying saucers become sexy again in the late nineteen seventies
when a researcher named Leonard Stringfield makes a public presentation
at the nineteen seventy eight Mutual UFO Network Symposium. Moof
On I think is what people call it.

Speaker 2 (24:19):
I've been to a mof on meeting.

Speaker 3 (24:21):
Oh, I would love to go.

Speaker 1 (24:22):
To a moof on meeting.

Speaker 3 (24:23):
That sounds like a hoot.

Speaker 2 (24:25):
It was he a blast.

Speaker 1 (24:28):
He claims that a retired Air Force colonel had told
him that an alien craft had in fact been recovered
at Roswell and this guy was one of the first
military responders at Roswell Roswell and died convinced that what
he saw was an alien spacecraft. The narrative starts to
pick up steam from here, and an nssay MIMO revealed
as part of a Foyer request suggests the CIA had

(24:49):
something to do with it. Here's go Wrightley's book again.
The memo dated August twenty ninth, nineteen seventy eight, was
written by an unidentified NSA AS signee who commented on
what he suspected to be a number of fraudulent CIA
memos presented at the symposium. It was later revealed that
the assignee in question was a former NSA employee and
mof On board. Remember Tom Delouis and a lot of

(25:12):
guys at moufon have like like are reached out to
buy people in intelligence agencies and fed info. So it's
very hard to say what, like, were these CIA memos
just something some people made up? Were they memos the
CIA faked? Or were they memos the NSA faked pretending

(25:32):
it was the CIA? Right, all of these things are
kind of possible because all of this shit happened to
some extent.

Speaker 2 (25:40):
And that they want to believe. Then you're just like, please,
I won't question it. Just give it to me.

Speaker 1 (25:44):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, just give me the good stuff. Yeah.
Speaking of the good stuff, that's the sponsors of our
podcasts and we're back. So if you take nothing else
from these episodes, it should be that military officers and
intelligence agency employees backing up UFO conspiracies or any other

(26:07):
kind of conspiracies. Doesn't mean those conspiracies are likelier to
be true because all of these people are professional liars, right.
Not only are they professional liars, but there's nothing that
means somebody who reached a moderately high level in the
CIA or the Special Forces or the DA is not
just as crazy as that guy you met at a
bar who claimed the Martian stole his best deference, right like,

(26:30):
Michael Flynn is out of his goddamn mind. Was legitimately
a guy with a lot of like who had had
a very high position in the military. Established he had
a lot to do with intel and specific areas, right like,
and he's you know, and a dick and a fascist. Now, yeah,

(26:50):
to your average American with slightly nerdy inclinations, a lot
of this UFO stuff is kind of like background noise.
Kids love it, you know. There's like an entertainment a
lot of movies and stuff based around this stuff in
the fifties and sixties, and so it's not necessarily like
taken super seriously by a ton of people. And it
probably started as kind of like a lark for a

(27:13):
guy that we're going to be talking a lot about
in these episodes, who was I think, I don't know
if hero is the right term, but I'm very sympathetic
to him. A fellow named Paul Benowitz, and Paul Benowitz
is the victim of Richard Dody and of the US
intelligence establishment during this period. He is an engineer with
a master's degree in physics who started his own small business,

(27:33):
Thunder Scientific, in nineteen sixty nine. People will say that
Paul was a genius with electronics. He is very good
at what he does. He'd moved to New Mexico to
be closer to the bleeding edge of the experimental aerospace industry,
and he dug a niche for himself there, providing different
measurement instruments for NASA and the Air Force. He hit
the market at a spectacular time when all of these

(27:56):
industries were exploding, and his intention was initially to get
a peece HD. And he has to like shelf that
because his company is so successful and it's growing so fast.
Thunder Scientific established a lab right outside of Kirtland Air
Force Base and had regular dealings with scientists and officers
from the newly established Air Force and the book Project Beta.
Greg Bishop Wrights, the demands of his business now left

(28:18):
little time for friends and socializing, but this did not
bother him. Thunder Scientific and his family were all that
he needed. What little time he had left was devoted
to plowing through a small collection of wild West novels,
his only guilty pleasure. So pretty nice, harmless guy. He's
making like altimeters and shit, like for devices for measuring
like you know, moisture in the air on planes and

(28:41):
stuff like that, kind of like nerdy stuff, right.

Speaker 2 (28:43):
No, totally, this is definitely the CIA is going to
ruin this mountain's.

Speaker 1 (28:47):
Yeah, intelligence, but the CIA, like there's a number of
people involved in fucking with Paul. For guy, Paul has hobbies.
He's a pilot and he's like an aerobatic pilot, so
he likes to do like plane stunts and shit.

Speaker 3 (29:06):
He's very good.

Speaker 1 (29:07):
And starting in the nineteen seventies he begins paying and
increasing attention to the UFO movement. He joins the Aerial
Phenomenon Research Association or APRO, which is a civilian UFO
research org based out of Tucson, And so that's like
somewhere I think sometime in like the mid seventies is

(29:27):
when he joins apro and so he's pretty plugged into
all this stuff. A year after Leonard Stringfield writes, you know,
he co writes that book that reignites interest in Roswell
and flying saucers. In April of nineteen seventy nine, Paul
attends a big conference on cattle mutilation, which had just
started to become a thing that people were talking about.
And this is when I say, a conference on cattle mutilation.

(29:50):
This is less kooky than a lot of these events
are going to sound, because in part there's some actual
shit being done to cow. So there's some very there's
some serious people there who actually, like, I want to
know what the fuck is going on?

Speaker 2 (30:04):
Uh.

Speaker 1 (30:05):
The event itself is hosted by Republican Senator Harrison Schmidt,
a former astronaut who'd walked on the moon. Among the
attendees were numerous FBI agents, politicians, local law enforcement officers,
scientists from Los Alamos, tribal officials, and of course new
age psychics wearing robes alongside dishevelled ufologists.

Speaker 3 (30:23):
Of course for the yeah, yeah.

Speaker 2 (30:25):
Of course, I mean they have they have to be there.
I mean, right, and what a party in the parking lot.
Somebody's got to be throwing the after parties.

Speaker 1 (30:32):
So you have there and acid I think is still
legal at this point. Maybe they'd banded by man. The
good koke is out there, people have quailudes. I bet
the parties were wild.

Speaker 2 (30:43):
Absolutely comic. Con Eat your heart. I wonder what the
swag is for the free swag for the cattle Mutilation Convention?
They what's in the go go away bag?

Speaker 1 (30:52):
Yeah, lymph nodes so a reporter for the New Mexico
and into to describe the conference as a farce featuring
the strangest collection of weirdos ever assembled in New Mexico,
and I will tell you right now that is no
longer an accurate statement. I've spent too much time in
New Mexico to believe that a lot of.

Speaker 2 (31:11):
Like, yeah, med Bar is the bar is an alien
one of my favorite states. Yeah, I love it.

Speaker 1 (31:20):
So said, weirdos were united by their interest in a
real phenomenon. This is not fake. The fact that cattle
are being found dead and surgically mutilated is not fake.
This is a thing that is happening right. There's a
lot of theories as to why. There's one that is
almost certainly the actual truth here that we're going to
talk about. But this is a real thing that is happening,

(31:41):
and people are rightfully like, what the fuck is going on?

Speaker 3 (31:43):
Right?

Speaker 1 (31:44):
This starts when a decent number of cattle are found
dead and surgically mutilated in the Dulcet area, like in
a near Dulce, New Mexico, which itself is near the
Hikarilla Reservation. One of the first investigators is a state
trooper named Gabe Valdez, who's a very like a kind
of a titan in the ufology figure field, and again

(32:05):
one of the guys who's more credible, you know, kind
of within this community, which is not to say does
not believe some stuff that can't be proven, but just
is one of the guys who is attempting to actually
go about some of this like scientifically. And Gabe as
he's looking because people, you know, he's getting calls from
like ranchers like I've got these cows, like fucking cut up, man,
this is fucking weird, he finds tripod prints near several

(32:27):
of the corpses, and he initially theorizes that there's an
a that this is evidence that an alien craft had
landed nearby, which it is not, but Waldas keeps digging
and he eventually uncovers evidence that that makes it very
clear this.

Speaker 3 (32:39):
Is human beings did this, right, And the.

Speaker 1 (32:42):
Specific evidence is that several cows were found to have
been drugged with atropine and a gas mask had been
found at one site.

Speaker 2 (32:48):
Right, god, damn, what's what's the matter with people? This
is a student film gone wrong?

Speaker 3 (32:57):
Brandy.

Speaker 1 (32:58):
This is so much more fucked up than you. Yeah,
this is so so fucking crazy. What the reason why
this is happening? The likely reason again, this isn't. I
can't tell you exactly. This is definitely what happened. But
the theory of Valdez and his son come up with,
I think is very credible. So Valdez starts to suspect

(33:18):
that the government is secretly killing and studying the corpse
of cattle. He found that most of the deceased animals
had their tongues and lymph nodes, specifically, their lymph nodes removed,
which is the organ you would take if you wanted
to do tests for cancers.

Speaker 2 (33:30):
Right, okay, yeah, so there is good reason.

Speaker 1 (33:34):
Now to suspect that these mutilations were tied not to aliens,
but to a secret government project called Project gas Buggy,
which had been launched in nineteen sixty seven as part
of the Plowshare program.

Speaker 3 (33:44):
You have you heard of the plowshare program?

Speaker 2 (33:46):
No, I don't know about the Plowshare program. It hasn't
come up in my searches.

Speaker 4 (33:50):
Oh Man.

Speaker 1 (33:51):
Is one of my favorite things the government ever did.
And by that I mean like one of the funniest things.
This is like fucked up and horrible, but it's extremely funny.
And it's also kind of soothing because if the government
did this what I'm about to explain to you and
didn't get us all killed, I think we've got a
pretty good shot of surviving the next few years. Great

(34:14):
love that I try to be hopeful here. So Project
Plowshare was named after Isaiah two to four in the Bible.
They will beat their swords into plowshares, right, And that
means like, we're going to take these weapons and turn
them into a tool that we.

Speaker 3 (34:28):
Used to get food. Right.

Speaker 1 (34:30):
The project was established as a way for Dwight Eisenhower
to feel less bad about presiding over the birth of
a planet killing Arsenal. In nineteen fifty three, he gave
his famous Adams for peace speech at the UN and
promise that the United States would quote devote its entire
heart and mind to find the way by which the
miraculous inventiveness of man shall not be dedicated to his death,

(34:50):
but consecrated to his life. And sort of the the
less kind of shiny, you know, beautiful thing going on
here is that, like we were making so many goddamn nukes,
but like by this point, by like the sixties seventy,
we have the sixties especially, like we've got enough nukes
to kill everything, right, and the Russians has the same
number basically, you know, yeah, and other people are starting

(35:15):
to get them, and like some of the folks making
the doing this feel kind of bad and are like,
I kind of want my life to be a little
bit more than just building a death machine for the
entire species. Maybe there's a way to use all of
these nightmare weapons to do good shit, right, Yeah, what

(35:35):
wishful thinking?

Speaker 2 (35:36):
That's adorable. Yeah, I'm not responsible for this world becoming
a barren waste land someday. Absolutely not. No.

Speaker 1 (35:43):
No, So the idea here is, let's figure out if
there's a way to use nuclear explosions to speed and
assist government civil works projects, right, different construction projects, and
specifically one of the big initial things. So in nineteen
fifty six, there's this thing called the Suez Crisis, right
the Suez Canal. You remember when that big boat got
stuck and at like, yeah, it was very funny, but

(36:05):
also shit got like really expensive for a while because
a lot of trade goes through the Suez Canal in Egypt,
it's very important. Well, in nineteen fifty six, the Suez
Canal Company, which had been owned by Britain and France,
gets nationalized by the Egyptian president and there's like a
crisis over like whether or not Europeans are going to
be able to use the Suez Canal. And like this,

(36:28):
by the way, is still a major factor in geopolitics.
Like particularly liberals in the US like to act like
France and whatnot is like so much less fucked up
of a country. But look look at the kind of
weapons France sells the Egyptians. No matter who's in charge,
no matter what they do to their people, no matter
how violent an asshole they are, France is always willing
to sell the Egyptians any kind of fucked up weapons

(36:49):
they want. Because there's this canal and it's kind of
a big deal, right, So yeah, fifty six the Seuez
Canal gets shut down, and people are like people in
our gay people in you know, our allied governments are like, fuck,
we got to figure out something. And what's the most
logical thing to do if you need to replace the
Suez Canal?

Speaker 2 (37:08):
Brandy, Oh, make it bigger, blow it up.

Speaker 1 (37:13):
No no, no, no no no, that's crazy talk. No,
the most logical thing to do is to detonate five
hundred and twenty thermonuclear weapons in a line across the
Holy Land through the Negev Desert to the Mediterranean Sea.

Speaker 4 (37:26):
Oh.

Speaker 2 (37:26):
I know about this. I just read about this.

Speaker 1 (37:29):
Holy Land five hundred nukes.

Speaker 2 (37:32):
Oh, that's so fun. That's this is also a recent
theory that's come up in the last oh say, a
year and a half or so we've been hearing about. Okay, interesting, great,
Yeah it is.

Speaker 1 (37:42):
I it's fascinating to think of how different everything going
on there would be if, like, an addition to all
of the awful stuff happening, everyone had fucking radiation poisoning
because we set off five hundred and twenty nuclear explosions.

Speaker 2 (37:56):
Jesus, that's probably wouldn't have gone.

Speaker 3 (37:58):
Well, I would have.

Speaker 2 (38:00):
Loved probably been in the initial pitch of this, just
somebody's like, all right, hear me out, I know this
mom can destroy anything? What if?

Speaker 4 (38:10):
Yeah?

Speaker 2 (38:12):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, let's get through okay, all right?

Speaker 3 (38:14):
Yeah? What do you think a picture of a shovel?

Speaker 1 (38:17):
We all hate digging, right, what do we love nukes?

Speaker 2 (38:22):
We just want to see what it looks like to
do that. It wouldn't gonna be the Earth and half
or anything.

Speaker 1 (38:27):
Yeah, no, I can't think of any downsides to setting
off five hundred and twenty nukes in the Holy Land.
Seems like a good call.

Speaker 2 (38:35):
What Jesus is really what he died on the cross for?

Speaker 4 (38:38):
Was this?

Speaker 3 (38:38):
Like he actually he would have loved nukes?

Speaker 1 (38:41):
Oh my god, Yeah.

Speaker 2 (38:42):
It's it's it's it's from the Book of Silas, which
is a horrible book that was we have never you know, published.

Speaker 1 (38:49):
Yeah, that's why we hate Silass. So the idea of
repurposing that this doesn't catch on people, Thank thank god?

Speaker 3 (38:56):
Enough are you? Are you out of your fucking mind?

Speaker 4 (39:02):
Do that?

Speaker 1 (39:02):
So we don't do this. But the idea of repurposing
nukes for civil use lingered on and In nineteen fifty seven,
Project Plowshare is established, and I want to quote from
a write up from the Science History Institute, Plowshare scientists
looked at the natural world as if it were a
piece of clay waiting to be sculpted by nuclear tools.
As the father of the hydrogen bomb, Edward Teller remarked,

(39:25):
if your mountain is not in the right place, drop
us a card. And I do love that, like atomic
era mad scientist.

Speaker 2 (39:33):
Shit, yeah, yeah, yeah, slag the flagger is real.

Speaker 1 (39:37):
Yeah, that is kind of that's kind of cool. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (39:41):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (39:42):
And in nineteen sixty, Popular Mechanics devoted an article to
the idea with Edward Teller. Sophie will pull up the
thing on the screen here, but like it's the cover
of Popular Mechanics March nineteen sixty. There's a picture of
Teller sitting at a desk with a bunch of papers.
We're going to work miracles. The atom's power is ready

(40:03):
to unlock a treasure chest of Arctic oil, dig open
an Alaskan harbor, open the spigot for Colorado's shale. And
this article is by Edward Teller. I'm going to read
a little bit of that opening When you look at
a map of Alaska, you will observe that Point Hope
at the northwest corner, projecting out into the out Arctic Ocean.
Above Point Hope, the shore is exposed to the polar

(40:24):
ice pack, which even in the summer, is never far
Offshore ships can travel north of this point only one
month and twelve but below Point Hope the shore swings
to the southeast and the sea is free of ice
for three months of the year. Nearby our coal deposits
and somewhat farther oil that might attract commerce except for
one vital lack. There is no harbor, no good anchorage

(40:45):
for sea going ships. So they theorize a number of things,
but one of them is to literally melt big chunks
of the ice caps with nukes so that we can
get it like coal and oil more effectively.

Speaker 2 (40:56):
I like that they just did the slow version of
it by just never move away from oil.

Speaker 1 (41:01):
Yeah yeah, yeah, we uh it turns out we got
there anyway, guys.

Speaker 3 (41:04):
Good news.

Speaker 2 (41:04):
Yeah, I mean, I guess better than nuking it. Probably.

Speaker 1 (41:08):
So Teller's got a problem, which is, we know at
this point radiation bad and thankfully, like hydrogen bombs, less radiation,
but like not no radiation, And so there's a there's
a very good question here, which is like, hey, if
we detonate like a nuke underground, won't it like could it?
Could that be bad? Could it like cause real problems?

(41:30):
And so Teller has to direct the first underground test
of a thermonuclear weapon to gather data for busy bodies
who kept asking questions like.

Speaker 2 (41:36):
That so annoying.

Speaker 1 (41:38):
So the initial data seems to be good. They detonate
a one point seven kiloton nuke in Nevada, and I'm
using nuke interchangeably here for all atomic weapons. Obviously, a
hydrogen bomb is a very different thing from like the
kind of bombs we used on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. But
these are they are mostly using like hydrogen bomb, Like

(42:00):
that is the idea for plowshare after a point, because
it's just like a better tool. And the initial data
seems to suggest that, like, oh, actually, like this might
be pretty safe, right, that's the initial data. This ignites
a spree of dangerously insane plans, like Project Gnome, which
suggested nuking a massive underground salt deposit in Alaska in

(42:21):
order to create heat and steam to run a turbine
providing power for a nearby city, and Sophie's gonna pull
up like a diagram explaining this where it's just like generator, turbine,
condenser and then molten salt from nuclear explosion.

Speaker 2 (42:38):
It's for sure gonna work.

Speaker 3 (42:39):
Definitely, it totally will be safe.

Speaker 1 (42:42):
It's not crazy at all, Like obviously molten salt from
a nuclear explosion. There's no possible downside to do it creating.

Speaker 2 (42:50):
That, so no, never.

Speaker 1 (42:52):
The good news is that local indigenous leaders find out
that like Tellers, like what if we just knew huge
chunks of like Inuit territory and shit to see if
that does something. And they're like this seems bad. And
they're particularly concerned because Teller had just carried out an
H bomb test a couple of years earlier in the
Marshall Islands that had gone bad and caused the highest

(43:13):
recorded levels of nuclear fallout and history. They had destroyed
several item islands, and like that people lived on, like
it's a real problem. We've done episodes if it could
happen here on the Marshalls and how much the US
focks them over. But Teller's a big part of that,
so you know, he doesn't get to newke Alaska to
the extent that he wants to Neewke Alaska. And again

(43:35):
and again his high hopes are dashed by the fact
that everything he suggests and does is completely out of
its mind. By nineteen sixty seven, Plowshare had moved on
to a new idea. Deposits of natural gas could be
extracted if nukes were used to break up dense rock
formations that kept them trapped. This is the origins, like
some of the origins of hydraulic fracking, right, initially they

(43:58):
want to do hydraulic fracking with nukes. Oh my god,
great stuff, guys. Yeah, let's bucket this planet nuke at all.

Speaker 2 (44:09):
No, No, it exists to be broken. It's the whole
point of living.

Speaker 1 (44:14):
Yeah, these these guys, it's amazing because like you can
get over the counter, like just incredibly potent barbituates at
this point, and everybody is drunk and on barbituates the
whole time this is going on. And when you understand that,
it really does explain a lot of the decisions being made.

Speaker 2 (44:30):
No, yeah, these are not sober decisions at all. These
are not These people.

Speaker 1 (44:34):
Are eating what is effectively xanax like candy bars. So
Project gas Buggy follows, right, that's the idea. We're gonna
frack with nukes. And they set off a bomb equivalent
to twenty nine kilotons of TNT in northwest New Mexico
near Dulce. From that article by the Science History Institute.

(44:54):
The detonation on December tenth, nineteen sixty seven blasted open
an underground chamber three hundred and thirty five feet high
and almost a hundred and sixty five feet in diameter,
and successfully fractured the rock, spurring a vast increase in
gas production rates at the site. Unfortunately, the blast also
contaminated the gas with radioactive tritium, making it unsellable to consumers.
So it does work, it just makes poison radioactive natural gas.

Speaker 2 (45:19):
Love it where we peep that? When we make that,
what do we do with that?

Speaker 1 (45:23):
I'm just curious what God willing now that our FK
is going to be in there.

Speaker 3 (45:27):
You know, I think we can.

Speaker 1 (45:29):
I'm hopeful that we can just make that legal to
use in homes and we can all have all the
radioactive tritium gas in our living rooms that we need.

Speaker 2 (45:36):
Yeah. Absolutely, I choose from my kids what they get
exactly exactly.

Speaker 1 (45:41):
Maybe it's good for them, you know, maybe maybe it
counteracts the vaccines.

Speaker 2 (45:45):
Yeah, eat your radioactive gas, kid, come on.

Speaker 3 (45:47):
Absolutely.

Speaker 1 (45:49):
Plowshare scientists wouldn't see real success in the fracking front
until nineteen sixty nine, when a nuke set off under
the Colorado River released one point five million dollars in
natural gas that was usable for the mere cost of
eleven million dollars. Also, the gas was still very poor quality. Eventually,
Plowshare was shuttered, but the radioactive tritium gas under New

(46:09):
Mexico near Dulce remained.

Speaker 3 (46:11):
Right.

Speaker 1 (46:12):
So, now we've got this big fucking hole underground filled
with poison.

Speaker 3 (46:17):
That's fun.

Speaker 2 (46:18):
I just know that's out there. It's all a ticking
time bomb.

Speaker 3 (46:22):
Yeah yeah.

Speaker 1 (46:23):
So we've got this like death thing out in the
middle of New Mexico and we don't really know what
the fuck to do with it right now. What I'm
going to say is not confirmed, but I consider it
quite likely. Gabe Valdez eventually comes to the conclusion that
the cattle mutilations around Dulci were carried out by government
scientists studying the level of environmental contamination caused by the

(46:45):
plowshare tests. If this is the case, it's something that
is still somewhat under wraps, and military spooks would have
put overtime work in to hide it back in the
nineteen seventies. But it makes a lot of sense. They're
clearly like studying animals around there to see like if
they developing cancers, and they don't want people to know
about it. I think this is actually a very very

(47:05):
likely explanation for at least a good chunk of the
cattle mutilations that are kind of found paid off, just
like curious Alien bought or fucking not bought scientists or whatever.

Speaker 3 (47:21):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (47:21):
No, yeah, you did not disappoint. You did not disappoint.
That makes total sense. I won't know which scientist was like,
let make sure you get the asshole.

Speaker 3 (47:29):
To get into that asshole.

Speaker 2 (47:30):
Yeah exactly. Is that part of the experiments, sir?

Speaker 3 (47:34):
I mean, why not.

Speaker 2 (47:36):
It's for the there's the showmanship of what we're doing here.

Speaker 3 (47:39):
We gotta get weird with it people.

Speaker 2 (47:42):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (47:43):
So this brings us back to Paul Benowitz because he
meets Gabe Valdez at that cattle mutilation conference and he
actually approaches Valdez and Valdez, who is like both an
active state trooper who kind of becomes like in his
area that whenever there's like weird alien ship, his colleagues
are like, hey, Valdez, go look into this, like you're

(48:04):
the you're the you're the crazy guy, right, go check
this out.

Speaker 2 (48:07):
And I just wanted to plant drugs, right.

Speaker 1 (48:14):
I think Valdez really does want to be doing this
because this kind of becomes his whole life. And he
he's like as soon as this random like engineer is like, hey,
can I like write along with you to like look
at weird alien stuff, Valdez is like, absolutely, Man, come on,
let's let's go trace down some fucking lights. And that's

(48:35):
exactly what they do. They do a lot of ride
alongs together and they they've become fast friends. Bnowitz is
a believer and Valdez is an open minded seeker. Right,
you know that that's kind of the the minimum of
what I'd say he is.

Speaker 2 (48:49):
What is their sexual tension like? And is this the
exact thing that X files is based on?

Speaker 1 (48:54):
Oh they're fucking yeah, absolutely, this is what Mullian. No, No,
they're not. I have no evidence, but it would be funny.
This is like the fucking uh yeah, the moulderin Scully Origin. Yeah,
the sexual tension you could cut with a knife. Also,
Valdez does in fact get pregnant with an alien baby.

(49:14):
That's very much confirmed. His dad's an admiral. I think
his Schully's dad was an animal. Maybe he was a captain.
I know he called her Starbuck.

Speaker 3 (49:23):
I just watched that episode the other night.

Speaker 1 (49:26):
So speaking of Dana Scully boy, she looked good in
a suit. Anyway, here's some ads. We're back. Everyone in
that show looked good in this fucking skinner. Oh my god,
Like he was powering into that uniform.

Speaker 3 (49:46):
Looked amazing.

Speaker 2 (49:47):
Yeah, No one talks about the fashion on the Xtra falls.

Speaker 1 (49:50):
Yeah yeah, those those real pencil ties. Fucking molder.

Speaker 3 (49:54):
Oh my god.

Speaker 1 (49:55):
Beautiful stuff, beautiful stuff. So in the winter of nineteen
seventy nine Innowitz and his wife experienced well not a
close encounter, but like an intermediate distance encounter at his
Albuquerque home. So his house is like right up to
the edge of the Kirtland Base, right, so he can
see like the base itself, and there's this mountain that

(50:16):
they had like hollowed out and filled with nukes, Like
he's looking at all of that from his fucking porch, right,
And he and his wife start to notice at night
blinking lights that are floating and moving independently in the
air over the base, and he is as a pilot,
He's like, this does not look like any kind of
aircraft I've ever seen, and in fact it is not
now again, not aliens. This is like drone projects. And

(50:41):
what becomes the stealth bomber is like, this is all
the kind of shit they're testing out at Kirtland. He
is seeing things, and he is seeing things that there
is no he does not have any kind of good
explanation for, right, because some of the things he's seeing
are experimental craft that are capable of things that the
broader populace did not know we could do with aerial

(51:01):
craft at this point in time. Now, because he's rich
and because he is a professional engineer, he has a
lot of equipment. He's got telephoto lenses, he's got a
Super eight camera, and he's got a lot of like
different advanced antenna that are capable of taking data on
the stuff that he's seeing, particularly the signals that these
different craft are putting out right, because they're all putting

(51:22):
out radio signals, they've got transponders and shit, right, you
want that on there, especially with an experimental craft. You
never know if one of those is going to like
wind up crashing into the ground. You want to be
able to grab it and shit. So he starts training
this whole, not just his cameras, but all of these
different in all these different electronic tools he has on
the base while this is happening, and he's getting real

(51:42):
data on something that is actually happening right now. The
thing is, and this is there's an interesting documentary about
this called Mirage Men, and it'll point out that Benowitz
is a World War Two era veteran. He is a
genuinely patriotic, helpful guy, and a lot of kind of
early UFO dudes are like this. So there, his instinct

(52:05):
is not the government is hiding something fucked up from me.
His instinct is, I wonder if the government knows something
clearly alien or otherworldly is happening above this base at
this constitution, I need to tell them what I found.

Speaker 3 (52:20):
Right, he is not.

Speaker 1 (52:21):
Deeply patriotic, and this country is going to fuck him
so hard.

Speaker 3 (52:27):
It does everyone who's deeply patriotic.

Speaker 2 (52:29):
Oh no, they're the bad guy. Don't do that. It's
watching somebody walk upstairs in a horror movie.

Speaker 1 (52:39):
Well, and and Dodie, who's like going to be fucking
with him for years over this is like you know
World War Two era veterans. You just tell them, hey,
we need you to help us with this, but you
can't talk. You got to keep it quiet, as is
national security. Of course, of course I trust the government. Sorry,
like I'm a child of the New Deal. I fought
for this country against the Nazis, you know, heroes. That's

(53:00):
rightly right, and that that's where Paul's head is right
in addition to literally believing in a lot of you know,
Kookie a Ley, he is the government doesn't start that
in him, right, he is down that road to an extent.

Speaker 3 (53:12):
Yeah. Yeah, So the reality of the.

Speaker 1 (53:14):
Situation is that he and his wife had documented evidence
of some kind of experimental plane, drone or other electronic gizmo.
There were a number of different things at the because
part of like this whole Kirtland base is like one
of the things that's kind of in this whole area
is Sandia National Laboratories, which at the time is the
number one weapons development facility in the United States at

(53:36):
least probably on the planet as a result of that,
and like one of the things they're working on is
early laser guided missiles, you know, in addition to other
different kinds of projects. One possibility for some of what
Paul saw is there's this massive it's actually the largest
freestanding wooden structure on Earth. Like even all of the
bolts are would it's this massive tower that they were

(53:56):
setting off like EMP blasts in order to test the
resilience of planes to nuclear explosions. So because of that,
you couldn't have any metal in the actual like thing itself.
I don't understand the science, but that's just what people say,
and that's apparently this was a thing that we did.
Apparently it wasn't very effective because we weren't like the
simulated blasts were not anywhere close to what a nuke

(54:17):
would have done. But this is a thing that they
were working on. There were lights on this thing. It
looked weird and it gives off you're getting some weird
fucking signals from this if you've got like different antennas
and stuff. In addition to the other shit that they're
fucking around with there. So I think somebody who was
less inclined towards belief in, you know, aliens in the
paranormal than Paul might have been like, yeah, there's probably

(54:39):
some sort of weird cold war weapons system being developed
there or whatever. Paul does not make that leap. He
captures grainy footage of lights with his eight millimeter camera,
and he uses his engineering knowledge design and construct a
tracking antenna array on his roof. Adam go Wrightley notes
quote Benowitz installed an arsenal of tracking antenna on his
roof to record signals apparently emanating from these UFOs, which

(55:01):
he claimed could DF direction find at distances of up
to sixty miles. Alarmed that these craft posed a national
security threat, Bennowhittz alerted Kirtland Base officials of his findings.
Not long after Bennowitz's received what he believed were alien transmissions. Now,
the reality of the situation, and again this is not
entirely clear, but what's very likely happening is that, being

(55:22):
a good engineer, Paul has built an array that is
actually receiving encrypted transmissions. Because the Air Force is experimenting
with classified broadcast technology to send out coding messages, and
Paul is picking this shit up right, some of its
great interference from the EMP set up, but he's actually
almost certainly getting some actual encrypted stuff, right yeah, yeah, yeah.

(55:44):
So he goes to the Air Force and he's like, hey, man,
I've been like listening and taking footage and there's like
aliens and they're like, yeah, okay, another alien guy. And
then he's like, and I pointed my incredibly advanced antenna
array at your base of secret military bullshit, and look
at these coded transmissions. And they're like, oh fuck, oh fu,
fuck this guy. This guy might actually have something that
could be a problem.

Speaker 3 (56:04):
We really don't want him doing this, but please don't.

Speaker 2 (56:09):
Don't oh shit, oh fuck.

Speaker 1 (56:13):
So the head of base security spends about a minute
on the phone with Paul and decides he's probably a crank,
but his status is the president of this legitimate lab
and the fact that he's getting something and this this
is potentially a risk to you know, this could expose
some of the projects they're working on, right, and maybe
Paul wouldn't even if Paul just publishes this stuff, being like, look,
is evidence of aliens and it's actual encrypto transmissions. Well,

(56:36):
Paul is going to publish that. Someone wouldn't be hard
at all for some sort of like Russian agent to
get that, and then maybe the Soviets crack this thing,
and like, right, there's a number of ways this could
be a problem, right, yeah.

Speaker 2 (56:47):
Yeah, they could decide to dig a ditch with a nuke.
So right, well, in fact, they do. I didn't bring
this up, but the Soviets have their own plowshare program
that also causes massive, massively poisons the planet. Everybody's doing
it in Soviet Russia. Do you cut out the bears? Assholes?
Is that what's happening in their fields? Instead?

Speaker 1 (57:09):
You just poisoned the largest freshwater body on the or
one of the largest freshwater bodies on the planet, and
then we're done. Everything's fine. So yeah, And it's also
maybe it's not the transmissions that freak him out. Maybe
it's that he's getting documentation about some of the craft.
You know, we don't know exactly what it is, but
like the Air Force doesn't just say, okay, you know,

(57:30):
tell this guy, we're making a.

Speaker 3 (57:32):
Note of it.

Speaker 1 (57:32):
They're like, we should keep talking to this dude. We
need to get one of our guys an agent from
the Air Force Office of Special Investigations to befriend Paul
Binowitz and see what he knows. And so the head
of base Security, Colonel Ernest Edwards, picks an Air Force
Office of Special Investigations agent named Richard Doty to do

(57:54):
just that, and we will be talking about Dody and
what happens next to our friend Paul in part do you.

Speaker 2 (58:01):
Clivinger? That's it? Anything you want to plug? Brandy? Yeah,
thank you, This was awesome. I'm excited to hear part
two for the listener. You guys can find me on
every social media app at this point at brand Azle,
I got the Blue Sky, I got the threads, I
got the ex still formally known as Twitter. I've got
read Note, I'm on there now. Who cares whatever, TikTok.

(58:24):
It's deleted from my phone, but my account exists Instagram, Facebook, wherever,
Brand Dazzle. Brandyposy dot com is my website for a
bunch of stuff. I have an album coming out in
March that actually recorded in Portland yet last year and
yeah burn this records on Instagram and Lady the Ladies
my podcast. Yeah, thanks guys.

Speaker 1 (58:45):
Excellent all right, everybody, Well until next time, you know,
go force your way into an Air Force bace and
just start taking photos.

Speaker 2 (58:54):
You know, Naruto run right on in.

Speaker 1 (58:58):
Yeah, right into Air Area fifty one. They love it
when people do that. It's a lot of fun for them.

Speaker 4 (59:08):
Behind the Bastards is a production of cool Zone Media.
For more from cool Zone Media, visit our website Coolzonemedia
dot com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Behind the
Bastards is now available on YouTube, new episodes every Wednesday
and Friday. Subscribe to our channel YouTube dot com slash

(59:29):
at Behind the Bastards